Every Night’s Dreams, 1933

Mikio Naruse’s elegantly distilled early silent film Every Night’s Dreams provides an archetype for the filmmaker’s recurring themes: pragmatic, determined women who tenaciously hold onto their failing relationships, weak men who lead a life of increasing dependence on the women they mistreat, life stations that grow baser as characters paradoxically strive to improve their situation. Structured in the framework of a melodrama, the story chronicles the life of a popular bar hostess and single mother named Omitsu (Sumiko Kurishima) as she struggles to rebuild her fractured family after her chronically unemployed husband (Tatsuo Saito) unexpectedly returns. Stylistically, Naruse incorporates a series of innovative camerawork: temporal cross-cutting, elliptical montage, and recurring shots of disembodied framing (most notably, in a night time sequence of running legs) the serve, not only to provide a compact precision – and therefore, emotional tension – to the film’s pervasive atmosphere of entrapment and existential stasis, but also to reflect the characters’ sense of disorientation and economic instability.